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From 'Saturday Night Live' to Jane Austen

IT IS 10 O'CLOCK IN THE morning, and Douglas McGrath is still waking up. ''Any time before noon is a shock for me,'' he says genially as he contemplates the breakfast menu in the sunny dining room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. ''Then again, I've been in a state of shock for a year.''

This particular morning, Mr. McGrath could be forgiven for being in shock. He has just made his directorial debut with ''Emma,'' one of the most ballyhooed movies of the year, for which he also wrote the screenplay. Last night, he flew in from his home in Manhattan to previewed it at the White House, and sat next to the President of the United States. The closest he had come to Bill Clinton before that was as creator of ''The Flapjack File,'' The New Republic magazine's desultory running parody of the First Family's doings from a Secret Service agent's view.

''The Flapjack File'' is a devastating send-up of President Clinton as a waffling fat-food fanatic married to someone known as Mrs. Rodham Flap and attended by a key aide referred to only as ''Mr. Steph.'' This parody followed one on the Bush Administration, called ''The Shrub File,'' which began when Mr. McGrath submitted an account of President George Bush's sudden ''sushi-refunding,'' as he puts it, at a state dinner in Japan.

But Mr. McGrath is neither too tired nor too shocked to be funny this morning. His eye alights on a low-fat selection billed as ''birchermuseli,'' a concoction of grains, nuts and lemon juice, and his lips pickle and his high forehead furrows in a frown. ''Sounds like John Birchermueseli to me,'' he mutters. When the waiter arrives, Mr. McGrath has something altogether different in mind: ''You don't,'' he purrs, ''happen to have a croissant that's collided with a piece of chocolate, do you?''

Mr. McGrath offers up a constant stream of epigrams, aphorisms, witticisms and adverbial asides like ''funnily enough,'' all delivered with perfect diction in the drollest of deadpans. He long ago learned that he could make money being funny and he has the resume to prove it. His first job out of Princeton in 1980 was as a writer for ''Saturday Night Live,'' and after more than a decade kicking around in the business, he hit the big-time in 1994 writing the Oscar-nominated screenplay for ''Bullets Over Broadway'' with Woody Allen.

He is also nothing if not self-confident. He proposed to direct ''Emma'' with practically no directing experience since his college days, and his next project is to be a one-man political satire off-Broadway. Still, that is a long way from Jane Austen's effervescent comedy of 19th century manners. What's a nice little satirist like him doing in a Hollywood maelstrom like this? In fact, he says, he had loved the novel for years, and always dreamed of making the movie. So while ''Bullets Over Broadway'' was being filmed, he simply drafted a screenplay.

''I thought when it opens, there'll be a window, but a little one -- and it'll be open for about one second -- when people think, 'Hey, who's this guy working with Woody, and what else does he have and what else does he want to do?' '' Mr. McGrath recalled. ''And I thought I should have something that would be harder to sell in a normal time, when I haven't just collaborated with a big genius. And this was before, of course, I knew that Jane Austen was going to turn out to be the John Grisham of the Romantic novel set.''

''I thought Jane Austen would be a good collaborator,'' he continues, ''because she writes, you know, superb dialogue, she creates memorable characters, she has an extremely clever skill for plotting -- and she's dead, which means, you know, there's none of that tiresome arguing over who gets the bigger bun at coffee time.''

Mr. McGrath took his screenplay to the folks at Miramax, which had released ''Bullets Over Broadway.'' They bit, and even agreed to let him direct. Next thing he knew, Mr. McGrath was in England for a rigorous 41-day shooting schedule, shepherding a sterling British cast led by one celebrated American ringer, Gwyneth Paltrow.

''If I hadn't been told, I would never have known that he was a first-time director,'' said Toni Collette, the Australian star of ''Muriel's Wedding'' who plays Harriet Smith, the object of Emma's well-intended but disastrous romantic scheming. ''His passion to adapt the novel brought about a certain empathy. He knew what he wanted, he was so calm, so specific. I can't say enough good about him.''

The closest Mr. McGrath came to Austen growing up was the town in Texas, where his father, a transplanted Connecticut Yankee, was an oil producer in Midland. But he says he feels comfortably familiar with the novelist's tight little slice of genteel British life in which Emma Woodhouse, matchmaker and meddler, comes to learn just how much she has to learn.

''I don't really think her world and Woody's world are so different,'' he says. ''It's a pretty small circle of society that they look at, the characters are very articulate in both worlds, they are usually, you know, fairly well to do, they have a great gift for speech and yet at the same time, no gift for actually understanding themselves at all. Nobody sees a shrink in her books, but other than that they're not so far apart in a tonal way.''

Mr. McGrath got his start in college writing orginal musicals for the Princeton Triangle Club, the venerable troup whose alumni range from F. Scott Fitzgerald to James Stewart and Jose Ferrer. While others concentrated on the club's annual spring extravaganzas, Mr. McGrath wrote and directed two smaller fall offerings, a first for the group.

''He made some statement I saw recently writing them off as youthful works, as opposed to his biting wit now,'' says Clark Gesner, a fellow Triangle graduate trustee and the author of ''You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.'' ''But they were sweet and tender and romantic, beautifully crafted little cameo musicals.''

From there, Mr. McGrath wound up at ''Saturday Night,'' during the first fallow year after John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and company left, a time he says ''helped teach the nation that it wasn't such a good idea to hurry home from that party and watch the show.''

But the experience brought him an enduring friendship with a fellow writer, Patricia Marx, who not only urged him to read ''Emma'' but eventually collaborated with him on a novel, ''Blockbuster,'' which purported to be the true tale of a Spielbergian director's effort to win acclaim as a serious artist by adapting ''The Pilgrim's Progress'' for the screen.

After selling a couple of unproduced screenplays, Mr. McGrath spent the 80's writing the occasional television pilot, newspaper and magazine satire and a single episode of ''L.A. Law'' for his old college chum, the series' writer, David Kelley.

''And so to supplement my income, which is a nice way of saying to constitute my entire income,'' he recalls, he tutored teen-age boys in English, French and history at St. Bernard's, a private boy's school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that is a brother school of Ms. Paltrow's alma mater, Spence. Some of his students came to the ''Emma'' premiere.

''I drew the line at math,'' he confesses. ''First of all, I don't even think it should be taught, and second of all, they have calculators now.''

Perversely, it was another disastrous Hollywood experience that helped bring Mr. McGrath into Mr. Allen's rarefied professional orbit. Mr. McGrath was dating, and has since married, Jane Martin, an old ''S.N.L.'' friend who is also a former assistant to Mr. Allen. The three eventually shared occasional dinners in which Mr. McGrath would tell horror stories about his work as a scripwriter on the ill-fated Don Johnson-Melanie Griffith remake of ''Born Yesterday.''

''And we got along real well because we shared a lot of the same interests,'' Mr. McGrath said. ''Because I like old movies and he likes old movies, and I love to talk about jazz and New York. Sports . . . unfortunately I can't step up to the table on any sports discussions. I'm really embarrassed about that.''

Still, Mr. McGrath is nothing if not a renaissance man. He is working on another screenplay, which he will describe only as a comedy set in the 50's and 60's ''about a man who ends up being involved with the C.I.A.'' His most immediate project is what a calls a ''berserk career choice,'' a return to political satire of the sort he has practiced for The Nation and later for The New Republic.

It is a one-man show called ''Political Animal,'' which he has written and will perform in an eight week run this fall at Second Stage Off Broadway in New York. It is about a candidate for President who, on Election Night, ''is thinking back over the various oily steps he's taken to reach that moment'' on issues from guns to abortion.

After all the lean years in his roundabout career path, Mr. McGrath is still pinching himself a bit, but happily these days.

''God,'' he sighs, ''I think it's a miracle I'm just not in a homeless center today.''